The 'decorative' artist

Bhattacharya's high prices fail to label him a serious painter.

Sanjay Bhattacharya's misfortune was creating a decorative genre in the late-'80s, a time when romantic Bengali meloncholia was already turning towards more intellectual abstraction.

Bhattacharya's immediate popularity placed the seal of success on his young shoulders, and even now gallerists like Sunaina Anand of Art Alive confirm "a large number of queries for his commissioned works".

But even while Bhattacharya's market and prices have remained steady, according to another gallerist, "his focus has not shifted from the eye to the mind".

In part, even serious artists like Anjolie Ela Menon, Sakti Burman or S H Raza have been similarly accused of creating decorative art, but in their case they had already made their mark by the time Bhattacharya was debuting, as a result of which the market had begun to control their prices.

"Sanjay, unfortunately, never reached that stage, which is why he has bombed as an artist," says the gallerist who believes that though he is on a par with Atul Dodiya or Anju Dodiya, over the long-term he has failed to reinvent himself as an investor-friendly artist .

There is certainly no dispute about his talent, and Sunaina Anand says he has his own distinct style that is on a par with the likes of Paresh Maity or Neeraj Goswami, both of whom are enjoying the run of the market.

But despite working on portraits, and the occasional experimentation, Bhattacharya has not evolved beyond romantic canvases, which restricts his works from becoming long-term investments.

But the artist himself decries the institution of art for investment. "This is not the criterion by which you should judge a painting," he says. How does he react to being labelled a drawing room artist? "If there weren't drawing rooms," Bhattacharya laughs, "artists wouldn't paint."

He tends to describe himelf as a "traveller painter". Because he's considered a "young artist", sales in the secondary market are few and don't offer any direction on the kind of prices he might fetch later, but one thing's for sure: his watercolours, smaller than his oils, are priced on a par with each other.